Sand
by GracefullyFallingDown
Summary: Fang buys a summers worth of surfing lessons from Max, but as they get to know each other better, will it turn into something more? Snarky comments, sexy Fang, and maybe a bit of summer love. However, the tourists don't stay forever, and three months might not always be enough when it comes to those forever kind of things. AU. AH. FAX.
1. Chapter 1

**_Chapter 1:_**

"Fuck. My. Life." Nudge stated loudly as she entered my parent's business, Ride the Waves Surf Shop (My last name is Ride. Ride the Waves. _Clever_). Luckily, I was on shift and my parents were out doing other things, so they didn't have the pleasure of being introduced to Nudge's foul mouth.

I straightened up from the surf board I had been waxing, wiped my hands on a rag and brushed my long blond hair out of my eyes. "What happened to you, Lil' Miss Sunshine?"

"Fucking god damned shitfaced Dylan Wate happened, that's what." I glanced around the shop, checking for customers. There were none. Tourist season hadn't quite started on Kiawah Island in South Carolina, so everything was pretty dead.

"Oh man, what did he do this time?" I hopped onto a table facing Nudge, who had plopped herself down on the counter, next to the ancient cash register my mom refused to replace. Nudge and Dylan had had an on-again, off-again relationship for the past few months, and honestly, things were getting slightly ridiculous.

"This is it, Max. I swear I'm done with him and his bullshit. You wanna know what happened? I went down to see him at his house, and guess who I find with her mouth suction-cupped to his face? FUCKING BRIDGET, THAT'S WHO. And when I walked in I was like, 'What the hell is going on here!?' and he just looks at me with his eyes all bugged out like a dying fish, and Bridget was all straddling him and she looked at me and was like 'Oh, you two are together?' and I was like 'FUCK YOU BITCH!' and—,"

"Wait," I cut off her rant, "I thought you guys broke up like, last week or something?"

Nudge deflated slightly. "Well, we did, but that doesn't give him the right to go fu—,"

The bell chimed on the door, which signaled the arrival of my first customer today. Nudge sighed and hopped off the counter.

"I'll call you tonight!" she said as she exited the shop though the back door. I nodded and jumped over the counter so I was behind the cash register.

"Hey! Welcome to Ride the Waves Surf Shop! If there's anything I can help you with, just let me know!" The shop was a maze of shelves, wet suits, surf and boogie boards, swim suits and more, so I hadn't actually see my customer yet.

"Actually, I was wondering if you knew anybody who gave surfing lessons or something," came a distinctly male voice from behind a rack of wet suits.

"Well, me, and pretty much everybody else on the island." I responded. Island kids had literally been on the water since they could walk. My parents had basically thrown me into the ocean as soon as I took my first step, and I had been surfing ever since.

"So how much do you charge, like, per hour or whatever?" the guy rounded the corner, and I got to see him in full view, and…

Oh damn.

He was wearing black swim trunks, no shirt, no shoes. Our surf shop was right on the beach, so this was a pretty regular occurrence, except it was usually fat old men or zitty thirteen year olds who had just started getting pecs that wandered in shirtless, not fricken' underwear models or whatever he was. He had golden-brown skin and black hair that flopped in his brown eyes.

"I—uh—," I stuttered, suddenly very conscious of my white string bikini and short shorts.

He smirked at me and flipped his hair out of his eyes. "You got a staring problem, sweetie?"

Okay, that snapped me out of it. "No, you just look just like my Aunt Margret, and it's kind of freaking me out."

He chuckled, and I saw his eyes quickly scan my body before focusing on something on the wall behind me. "So it says on your little sign that lessons are ten bucks an hour?"

"Twenty if you piss the instructor off." I said jokingly in return. He was probably about my age, maybe eighteen at the most.

"And the instructor would be you?" he asked, leaning casually against the counter and causing me to notice his toned abs again.

"So it would seem."

He chuckled. "Then I'm fucking screwed. Do you take payment before or after?"

"Depends. Can I trust you?" I gave him searching look.

"Sure."

"Cool. Pay me after, then." I pulled out a sheet of paper that had all my surfing lessons scheduled on it. "I have all of tomorrow open, so whenever, I guess."

"Nice. I don't know when my family will let me go, though, so…?"

I ripped off a corner of the paper and scrawled my cell phone number and name. "Call me. I can be at the beach in like 15 minutes no matter where I am." I shoved the piece of paper across the counter as the bell rang, signaling the entry of another customer.

"Alright. See you tomorrow..." He glanced down at the paper, "Max."

I shot him a grin. "Yeah. Hey, I didn't catch your name."

The guy was already walking away to exit the building, but he turned and called over his shoulder.

"Fang. My name's Fang."

I waved at him quickly before turning to greet the next customer.

"Hey! Welcome to Ride the Waves…"

X

"So, did anybody interesting come in today?" Nudge asked me after her half an hour rant about Dylan.

"Actually, yeah." I said, jamming my cell phone between my head and my shoulder as I jiggled the door to my porch. The humid island weather had caused the wood to warp drastically, and now, to be able to open it, you had to use just the right combination of pushing, knob-turning and a few well-placed kicks. "This guy came in. Wanted surfing lessons. I haven't seen him around before."

We had people flock to the island every summer, and there were a few regulars that we kept in contact with. My close friend Iggy commuted to Kiawah every summer from New York, and Nudge had especially bonded with one of the townies named Ella, who was from roughly the same area as Iggy. Connecticut, I think. Mostly, however, we islanders stuck to our own little groups of fellow islanders. Nudge and I were friends with Gazzy and Angel, twins that were 16 years old, same as us. We also hung out with Kate, Dylan (when he and Nudge weren't fighting), and Jamie.

All of us were native islanders except for Nudge and Jamie, meaning our ancestors had been part of the tribe that lived here, and we had the characteristic traits of most of the island kids; high cheekbones, deeply tanned skin, stormy grey eyes and sandy hair bleached by the salt and sun. Nudge was half black, a descendant of a slave family that had lived on Kiawah in the ninetieth century, and Jamie's grandparents had moved here in the fifties to take over the Fish Mill, a packaging center for the massive amounts of seafood hauled in by local fishermen. He had the tan of someone who spends all day in the sun, but he had chocolaty brown hair with golden highlights and piercing blue eyes.

"Was he cute?" Nudge cut into my thoughts.

"I guess. If you like that kind of thing," I said in a non-committal tone, while secretly thinking about his model-worthy body.

"I bet he—oh, shit. Dylan's calling me again. I should probably answer him this time. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" I mumbled a goodbye, and hung up the phone with a soft click. The hammock I was laying in swayed in the warm breeze that flowed through the screened-in porch, because it was too hot to sleep inside, and I smiled to myself as I drifted off to sleep.

**Soooooo? What do ya think!? Leave a comment! Let's try to get up to 30, yeah? **


	2. Chapter 2

**Aloha! Chapter 2 for y'all! Thank you for 31 reviews! You guys make me happppppy:D**

_-Recap-_

_"Was he cute?" Nudge cut into my thoughts. _

_"I guess. If you like that kind of thing," I said in a non-committal tone, while secretly thinking about his model-worthy body. _

_"I bet he—oh, shit. Dylan's calling me again. I should probably answer him this time. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" I mumbled a goodbye, and hung up the phone with a soft click. The hammock I was laying in swayed in the warm breeze that flowed through the screened-in porch, because it was too hot to sleep inside, and I smiled to myself as I drifted off to sleep. _

_-End-_

**_Chapter 2:_**

"This was a terrible idea." I said somewhat breathlessly as I pulled myself the rest of the way up to the tip of the towering rock formation, half a mile off the eastern beach of Seabrook island, Kiawah's neighboring island where most of our families actually lived. Kiawah was mostly filled with resorts, touristy businesses (like my families), and massive mansions. Seabrook island, though it was just across a river and still mostly considered part of the bigger island, was much more low-key, with salt-box houses lining the thin, rocky beaches, strawberry fields on the western portion and miles of mudflats on the southern tip, and many more hidden beaches and alcoves.

The beach that Sam and I had departed from was technically named Christopher Cove, but most of us island kids called it Creepy Cove due to the dull, colorless mudflats to the right and tall, craggy, dark rocks to the left, not to mention the story of the boy why had committed suicide by jumping off of one of said rocks with an anchor tied to him and his girlfriend. Layla, the witch-lady, (aka local crazy old woman), says that on the solstices, his soul still crosses back from the spirit world and waits for another victim to drag to the icy depths with him.

It has become something of a tradition to lure a couple townies out to the beach on the summer solstice, tell them the story, and then ditch them there for the night. One year, Gazzy decided to make it even more elaborate and dresses all in white, painted his face with a grizzly-looking leer, and wandered around wailing at the top of his lungs for a couple hours. The poor kids finally got so scared the one of them actually had asthma attack and we had to cancel the gig and bring them back to the mainland, but it was worth it. We still laugh over that night, and even though it didn't end so well, it didn't stop us from going back and doing the exact same thing to a couple island kids the next year. We were a bit more forgiving with them, though.

"Jesus, Max, look at the view, though!" Sam shielded his eyes from the sun and squinted at the horizon, the planes of his face casting dark shadows under his cheekbones. "So beautiful!"

We had paddled out to the small, isolated sand mound on our boards, and deposited them on the soft white beach before making out way up the massive rock that rutted out from the bottom of the ocean. I glanced tiredly out to where Sam was looking, and was…well, honestly, not that impressed. Sam was able to find beauty in almost everything, from the simplest, everyday objects ("Max, look at the inside of this peach! That way the color just explodes from the core…") to the most complicated scenarios that required a lot of deep thinking before you could even begin to understand what he was talking about ("Max, don't you find the life of a goldfish so incredibly amazing? It goes through every day with a five second memory span, and yet it still manages to find some sort of purpose.")

For me, though, peaches were for eating, goldfish were useless, and the sun was in my eyes. I broke out of my brief trance to find Sam staring at me intently. "Beautiful," he whispered again.

Woooooah, Nelly.

Sam and I were good friends, but he didn't hang out with my usual group because he was, well, Sam. He was a bit more on the shy side, preferring long walks and photography to hazing the townies and skinny dipping at the Flats in the wee hours of the morning. He was nice enough, and I liked him quite a bit, but not…like…that. At. All.

So, as he was leaning in to kiss me, you can imagine how relieved I was when my phone rang.

X

I was waiting on the beach for almost 15 minutes before Fang decided to make an entrance.

"Sorry. Some family stuff came up." was his only explanation, and he turned away from me quickly, shielding his face. I didn't want to press, so I stood up and grabbed my board.

I was clad in a yellow bikini top and orange wrap skirt over yellow boy-shorts style bottoms, gear I had thrown on after my little escapade with Sam. The wrap skirt was borrowed from Ride the Waves. Fang, however, was in a tee shirt and plaid shorts, definitely NOT something he would be wearing surfing. He would need to rent a board, too, so I decided paying a little visit to the shop wouldn't be a bad idea.

"Listen, you don't have to pay right now, but you'll need to rent a board and buy a suit…do you have a suit?" I asked as I sauntered up the gradual slope of the beach to the shop. I was closed today, as it was a Sunday, but I pulled the extra key out from behind the statue of an Easter Island head and opened the glass-paned door. "I can start keeping a tab for you, if you want."

"I'll get a new one. And a tab would be awesome." Fang intoned behind me as he entered the building. I flipped the light switches with my elbow and began scanning the room for the items we would need.

Fang picked out a pair of black board shorts, and I wrestled one of the seven foot rental boards off of the wall. Jamming it under my arm, I left Fang alone in the shop to change into his suit. Trying not to stare at his (perfect, sculpted) body too much when he came out, I locked up and jogged down to where I had left my board at the edge of the beach.

X

Ten minutes into the lesson, and I could already tell that Fang had the coordination of an Olympic hurdler, but the balance of a drunk five year old on a teeter-totter. He would try to stand, immediately begin to tip over, but would manage to turn his potentially embarrassing fall into a perfectly executed front flip before he hit the water. The waves were so small you could barley call them waves, so there wasn't really a danger of him getting swept away. I mostly hadn't interfered as he paddled out into the water, tried to stand, fell, and repeated. It was good for him to get a feel for the water, to make him more comfortable with the tide supporting his body weight.

I was currently sitting with my legs on either side of the surf board, staring at the horizon. I could hear Fang's whoops of surprise and, I expected, a certain amount of delight, behind me.

"Max!" he called.

"What's up?" I said back, spinning to face him. He ginned at me from where he was paddling in the water.

"I just wanted to say thanks," he began. "You know, for teaching me and stuff."

I cocked my head at him, tempted to let the warmth in my chest that urged me to let myself like him, to be his friend, take over. But, like always, I pushed it down, stiffed it, and then chopped it up into tiny pieces with a metaphorical butcher's knife.

"Don't thank me," I replied. "You're the one paying."

**Yes, I'm aware that it has been forever. However, in my defense, I'm writing a novel. If any of y'all would like to read some of what I have so far, massage me!:)**

**Get me up to 50 reviews, and you'll find out why Max is so closed off from friendship, specifically from attractive men! **


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